


I'm A Wing, I'm A Prayer

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Angst, Animal Transformation, Canon except for the fairy tale, Curses, Fairy Tale Curses, Fairy Tale Retellings, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Muteness, Pre-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), Swantrick, Tales from 2004, The Wild Swans, Write your own swan song jokes please
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 21:36:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Pete doesn't know his ex-girlfriend is a witch until she curses him. When the curse puts Patrick in harms' way, what will he do to break it?i am a wing, i’m a prayera thimble and an acorna promise from a poor apothecary—to an understudy in love forlorn





	1. you only hold me up like this ‘cuz you don’t know who i really am

**Author's Note:**

  * For [immoral_crow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/immoral_crow/gifts).



> A retelling of The Wild Swans for my darling Ais, [with a playlist to set the mood](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/56PHBMavDmVrg0Rwrv3Dtt).

 

 

Pete goes to sleep a scumbag and wakes up next to a swan.

It’s like coming back from a far-away place, foggy with jet lag and spatially confused, waking up in Patrick’s bed. Memories of the night before filter in: the screaming match, Pete’s fist through his driver’s side window, his now-ex girlfriend cursing him out, showing up at Patrick’s door bloody and wrecked, begging his way into Patrick’s sympathy, into Patrick’s bed. Patrick supervising the cleaning of his wounds, fussing over him crabbily, grumbling about the injustice of having to share with a cold-toed blanket thief when they’re not touring. Patrick smiling when Pete’s back was turned, not realizing Pete could see him in the mirror. Heartbroken and teeming with regrets, but not alone. Not alone.

So he wakes up, takes a breath or two and lets the events of yesterday catch up, sink in. He flinches as they hit him. Then he rolls over, harassment of Patrick ready on his lips, and gets a faceful of rumpled feathers.

Talk about bedspins. Pete has to recalibrate all over again, rifling through his memories. Where did waterfowl come in? Did they get drunk and raid a petting zoo? But no: neither of them drink. Pete remembers the whole evening, from crying on Patrick’s doorstep to shimmying into Patrick’s pajama pants. There were definitely no swans involved.

The swan lifts its head, its big orange bill, its black eyes, its smooth white feathers. It blinks at Pete. It tilts its oblong head. It opens its beak and says, “Blat?”

Pete leaps out of the bed like it’s burning. Holy shit. Swans are _mean_. He bolts, slamming the bedroom door behind him, and skids down the apartment hall. “Patrick?” he calls, a little panicked. Whatever amount of panicked corresponds with waking up next to a swan. This is not the way grenade jumping usually works. “Patrick! Bob?”

Pete slides into the kitchen and comes face to face with Patrick’s roommate, Bob Bryar. Bob looks groggy, has a spoonful of cereal halfway to his mouth. “Have you seen Patrick?” Pete asks, rumpled and wild.

“Isn’t he with you?” Bob asks, raising his eyebrows a little more suggestively than Pete appreciates.

Pete doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with Bob right now. He’s been awake all of two minutes. The swan situation is his first priority. “Did you—get any new pets, Bob?” he asks instead.

The cereal makes it into Bob’s mouth. He chews contemplatively. After a longer time than he needs, he says, “Nope.”

Shit. Shit, shit.

“Why?” asks Bob.

“No reason!” lies Pete. Inspired, he seizes some oven mitts and a dish towel off the counter—it’s the likeliest swan wrestling gear within his sightline, anyway—and heads back down the hall to. To deal with this problem, somehow. Maybe he should call animal control? Maybe he can get it on some kind of lead and let it go in a park? Maybe—maybe—

Doesn’t Pete have enough problems? Break-up, broken window, general disaster? Why is he on the swan shepherding squad now, too?

And more importantly of all: where the fuck is Patrick?

*

Okay, so once Pete calms it down, the swan is surprisingly cooperative.

It’s having a kind of panic when Pete ventures back into the bedroom—he finds it flapping so hard it’s hurting itself, beating its wings against the furniture and whirling around like a white maelstrom. Its beak is full of its own feathers, their tips red with blood where the bird has ripped them out.

It’s heartbreaking in a way Pete wouldn’t have guessed, seeing such a beautiful animal tear itself apart. Pete feels its fear and sorrow in his own heart. This is why ballerinas play swans, he realizes: their grace and elegance convey a kind of perfect, innocent beauty that he can’t bear to see damaged.

He’s not exactly a classically trained fowl wrangler, so he goes with his first instinct: throw a blanket over its head. “Easy, easy,” Pete says. “I shouldn’t have left you, I’m sorry. Please calm down. You’re hurting yourself. You’re hurting Patrick’s furniture and it _must_ be hurting you.”

Maybe it’s the sudden darkness or the weight of the blanket or just the tone of Pete’s voice, but the swan stops its hurricane fit. A low, keening hiss emits from the under the blanket. Pete reaches out cautiously, lays the lightest of touches on the blanket protrusion he thinks is the swan’s head. It flinches initially, then presses into the touch. Pete pets the swan’s head region gently through the blanket. “Hey, buddy. Hey,” he says, keeping up the soothing patter in case that’s what’s calming the swan. “I don’t know how you got in here—this is so not Patrick’s kind of prank—but I’m going to get you home, all right?”

Then Pete considers his promise. “Don’t suppose you know your address,” he jokes to the swan. The swan, muffled by fabric, says, “Hhhhgh?”

He tries to pick up the bundle of swan, but that doesn’t go well. They’re stuck like that for a while, the swan in the dark and Pete calling Patrick’s cell phone again and again. It keeps going to voicemail and there’s no number of messages he can leave that will help him get the swan out of here. Eventually, he makes a deal with the bird. “I’ll let you out from under the blanket if you promise to be calm,” he says. The swan honks softly.

It looks a little worse for the wear, its crown ruffled in an undignified manner with static electricity and some very sad bald spots in its coat, but is quite well behaved. Pete reaches out slowly, watched closely by its black eyes, and strokes its head. God, swans are big. Even with them getting along so well, he’s more than a little frightened of it.

“The only place in the city I’ve ever seen swans is Lincoln Park Zoo,” Pete says. “Do you want to go there?”

In a gesture that can only be taken as a no, the swan goes ahead and resumes _freaking the fuck out_.

*

Finally, Pete leaves the swan in Patrick’s bathtub with a pile of lettuce (in case it gets hungry, and also is a creature that eats lettuce). He has no idea what to do about this situation, but he’s starting to get seriously worried about Patrick, so once he’s made the swan as comfortable as a swan can really be in a two bedroom apartment in Wicker Park, he sets out to look for his friend.

He’s on his way to the record shop where Patrick works when he runs into Jeanae.

After last night—their ugliest and most final break-up yet—she’s the last person he wants to see. But she reacts to the sight of him like he’s the reanimated dead. “What are you doing here?” she blurts.

Pete pauses, looks around at himself, the El tracks overhead, the alley with steaming grates to his left, the city street to his right. “I appear to be walking,” he says. Pete knows this is the kind of answer that makes people want to strangle him. He’s not in any kind of mood to be polite to Jeanae this morning, and he’s a little distracted by the whole _missing best friend_ and _somehow responsible for a motherfucking wild swan_ problems.

Jeanae has backed up two steps, looking paler than usual. She’s dressed in chunky black platform heels, a ragged velour dress, and an army surplus camo jacket. Her dyed-red hair hangs around her face, her features made striking by dark cosmetics. She’s taking in the sight of Pete from head to toe and back again, studying him like he’s not the shape or state she expects. It’s making his skin crawl.

“I can’t believe it didn’t work,” she’s muttering now. She plucks at a large bandage wrapped around her right palm. “I _know_ there was enough blood. And Mari checked my translation…”

Pete, with a bandaged hand of his own, really does not want to deal with this conversation anymore. Isn’t the whole point of breaking up that you don’t have to put up with the other person’s odd bullshit anymore? “Yeah, well, great seeing you,” Pete says sarcastically, and makes to push past her.

“You’re supposed to be cursed right now!” she says. Her voice is creeping up towards a yell in her frustration. “I was outside Patrick’s window working the spell _all night_!”

“Oh, so you’re a witch now? Great. Great job. 10/10 curse. What was it supposed to do anyway?”

In the lowest, most forbidden voice he has ever heard, Jeanae intones, “ _May what’s ugly inside you show outside too_.”

Yeah, Pete’s got more important things to do than have this weirdo conversation. There’s enough he doesn’t like about his body and his brain without diving into Break-Up Part Two: Instant Replay. He feels absolutely ugly enough, inside and out.

“Bye forever, Jeanae,” he says, and he walks away, something nagging low in his belly that he does his best to ignore.

Three steps later, he stops again. He turns back to his ex-girlfriend. Fuck He might as well ask. “You haven’t seen Patrick anywhere, have you? Like when you were outside his apartment all night like a mentally well-adjusted person? You didn’t happen to see him leave?”

“ _I’m_ not going to be the one who reunites you two,” Jeanae snarls. Patrick’s role in Pete’s life had been cited freely in last night’s fight. “If he’s gone, good for him!”

Pete thinks this is as close as he’s going to get to a helpful answer. He leaves her there, in the middle of the sidewalk, chanting behind him.

*

A list of places where Patrick isn’t: the record shop, his favorite gyro place, the bookstore, his mom’s house, hanging out with Joe, any of the Starbucks in this entire neighborhood. Pete looks everywhere he can think of, calls everyone Patrick even vaguely knows. By dinnertime, he’s forced to admit that wherever Patrick is, he doesn’t want to be found. Pete’s better off waiting at his apartment than running all over the city. Patrick lives there; he’ll have to come back eventually, right?

In the meantime, Pete’s gotta see about a swan.

The swan is docile and sad when Pete returns to it. Pete lets himself in with the key Patrick keeps trying to get back from him and calls out, “Hello? Anybody?” There’s no sign of Patrick or Bob (one count of worry, one count of relief) but a low, mournful “ _Harrrrn_ ” sounds from the direction of the bathroom.

There is lettuce _everywhere_. The bathroom is a wet, feathered mess. The swan, looking more wilted and less dignified than ever, has curled up uneasily on a crumpled towel. It doesn’t appear to have eaten any of the lettuce, just shredded it with ruthless abandon. It lifts its strange, oblong head and blinks at Pete. Its black-and-yellow eyes look terribly sad.

Pete sits on the floor beside it, not caring that he’s sitting in a puddle that’s soaking through his jeans. He leans his head back over the edge of the tub, the inside of which does not bear description. It’s been full of 3 inches of water and an adult swan all day. It’s not pretty in there.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” Pete sighs. “Did you eat anything today?”

“ _Mrreh. Mrreh_ ,” the swan clucks sadly. Pete must be imagining it, but for a second he thinks the swan is shaking its head.

“Me neither.” Pete holds up the greasy bag of takeout he’s brought with him. “Do you like gyros?”

The swan blats excitedly, fluffing up and smoothing down its wings. It can probably smell the fries. Pete feels a little weird about giving a swan undifferentiated animal flesh, so he eats the gyro meat himself and shares the pita and French fries.

“You shouldn’t just eat carbs,” he tells the swan while it makes an absolute massacre of a pile of fries and ketchup, its scissored beak sending potato bits flying. “Bad for you. What do swans eat, anyway?”

Okay, he’s definitely imagining things now, because it looks to Pete like the swan hitches up its wings and _shrugs_.

Pete makes the executive decision to leave the bathroom exactly as it is—after all, this swan is Patrick’s prank, isn’t it? He and the swan go back to Patrick’s bedroom and sit on the bed. He uses Patrick’s laptop to learn about the dietary needs of swans—French fries do not actually appear on any of the lists he finds, which is obviously a mistake, as the swan fucking _loved_ them—and wildlife refuges in the Chicagoland area.

The swan nestles beside him on the bed. It’s surprisingly companionable. “How about this one?” Pete asks, showing the swan a picture of a wildlife preserve out in the northwest suburbs. The swan nips at the back of his hand, letting out a small hiss. “Okay, but you can’t say no to all of them,” Pete says, scrolling to the next result. “I don’t think you can afford rent in this neighborhood.” Pete doesn’t think it’s odd at all, that he’s having a conversation with a swan. Birds are supposed to be smart, right? Swans are basically dinosaurs, and if Jurassic Park taught him anything, it’s that raptors can use doorknobs, language, and barter economies.

Pete shows the swan pictures of mealworms next, after reading a blog that suggests mealworms are gourmet dining for swans. It begins to hiss and flap its wings at the screen. Pete laughs, scrambling away from the large bird. Swan wings _hurt_. “Don’t! You’ll break Patrick’s laptop! What if I make the mealworms into a smoothie?”

The swan hisses and flaps harder. Pete rolls off the bed to escape, landing ungracefully on Patrick’s bedroom floor. Suddenly he realizes he’s eye-to-eye with Patrick’s wallet, cell phone, and keys.  They’re in a pile with his jeans from yesterday and his Bingo cap, which Pete knows from experience is how Patrick gets ready for bed: dump everything he was wearing into a pile, and dig through it later when he can’t find his driver’s license or needs another sock.

This pile makes it look like—like Patrick never left the apartment at all.

“Patrick was kidnapped,” Pete breathes in horror.

The swan pokes it head over the edge of the bed and lets out a disdainful _blat_.

Pete doesn’t care if a fucking _swan_ thinks he’s being catastrophic. Kidnapping is the only explanation. Unless—

Unless Patrick is still inside the house.

Pete launches to his feet. He’s just gotten a good look under the bed and all that’s under there is dirty laundry. But there are lots of other places Patrick could be hiding, right? Because he could be perfectly safe and just, like, hiding weirdly in a cabinet. Right?

Pete tears through the apartment, throwing open every closet and cabinet, emptying Bob’s dresser drawers, ripping apart Bob’s bedding in case Patrick is somehow secreted away in blanket folds. He’s working himself more and more into a panic, because Patrick isn’t _anywhere_ , Patrick could be in trouble, Patrick could be _hurt_ , the sun’s gone down and it’s dark and Patrick is _missing—_

Pete’s dialing 911 and skidding back into Patrick’s room to double-check the laundry under the bed and generally freaking out, and then Pete is stopping dead with his mouth dropping open and sputtering, trying to understand what he sees before him.

There on the bed, haloed in a spray of feathers, with a blissy, disoriented look on his face, is Patrick.

“Please state your emergency,” says the 911 operator. Pete is speechless. “Hello? Hello?” comes through his phone.

Patrick blinks at Pete dazedly, slightly shiny with a fine dazzle of sweat. This soft, sweet look on his face—through Pete’s haze of dumb panic, all he can think is that this must be what Patrick looks like in a post-orgasmic glow.

“Please state your emergency,” repeats the operator.

Patrick looks at his hands, turning them to and fro in wonder. Softly, he says, “I was a swan.”

 


	2. i wish i kept my words behind my tongue

So Patrick’s in his bedroom like, stroking his own palms in a total fucking daze. Pete wouldn’t believe it—wouldn’t believe anything about this whole situation—except there’s no other explanation. Just like he couldn’t find Patrick before, he can’t find the fucking swan _anywhere_. Patrick’s got feathers stuck all over him and he keeps making these very swan-like motions with his head, as if he expects his neck to be much longer. He’s not producing much sensible language yet. So far he’s told Pete “I don’t like lettuce, you asshole” and “Don’t you dare donate me to a zoo” and that’s been about it. Neither of them has asked any important questions yet, like _what the fuck_ or _how_ or _why_ , because those questions are fucking terrifying to contemplate.

Pete had collapsed on top of him and cried a few shaky, grateful tears til Patrick pushed him off. His time as waterfowl has not made him any more snuggly. Now Pete’s pacing in the hallway outside Patrick’s room—he doesn’t want to let this kid out of his sight, like, _ever again_ —hoping against hope Jeanae will experience temporary insanity and answer an incoming call from Pete.

“What the fuck do you want, Peter,” comes over the line. Pete has never been so relieved to be greeted with a gush of spite.

“If your curse had worked, how would I break it?” he asked.

Jeanae’s voice curls with delight. He can feel her malicious grin coming through the phone and it’s familiar, her obvious and caustic loathing. The last few months of their relationship have been more like open warfare than love. But Pete’s never good at ending things, especially punishment.

“Peter, did you grow a tail?” she asks. “Terrible facial disfiguration? Do you have _scales_?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, pausing in the doorway to peek in at Patrick. Patrick is holding a feather up to the light and gawking at it. Safe. Whole. _His_. Pete blinks with surprise at the savageness of the thought, the gut-deep protectiveness. “It’s temporary, right? It would be temporary, like as a joke?”

Jeanae’s laugh gets richer, dark like coffee, coiling like smoke. Love and hate are all tangled up, as usual. “Oh, no,” she says. “Quite permanent. By light of day, all can see what’s ugliest in your heart. Only in the lonely nights will you be yourself again, wearing that pretty skin that wraps up so many lies.”

Sometimes you don’t know your ex-girlfriend is a witch until she curses you. Then it becomes really obvious. Pete’s thoughts churn. If he’s right, if this fucking curse is the reason Patrick spent the day as a swan—then Jeanae’s saying Patrick will be a swan again by sunrise.

This is unacceptable. Patrick Stump is a genius, Pete’s favorite person in the universe, the only reason Pete can even see in color. Patrick Stump is not going to spend his life as a _swan_.

How the fuck is Pete going to explain this to Joe and Andy? To Patrick’s _mom_?

No. No. He’s breaking the curse.

“Jeanae. How do I break the curse,” he demands. It is no longer a question.

She’s still laughing, of course. Pete wants to punch through another one of his car windows. “That’s the best part, asshole. It can only be broken by someone who loves you—so that’s the first impossible challenge. You can be released only through someone else’s love, courage, and perseverance. They must gather stinging nettles that grow on graves and blister and burn their hands, and break them down into flax. They must spin a coat with long sleeves to cover your ugliness.”

This is all getting a little too Hans Christian Andersen. “ _Nettles_?” Pete interrupts. “Where the fuck in Chicago will I find—”

“I just said—on graves. You’re not listening.”

“Okay, where the fuck in Chicago will I find _graves with nettles_ then?”

“I don’t know, Peter. In graveyards. That’s not the point.”

“No, actually, it seems pretty goddamn relevant—”

“I’m not finished!” Jeanae snaps. Pete’s always annoyed her by interrupting her Serious Goth Aesthetic. Maybe she thought dating a musician-poet would be all romance, reciting Mary Shelley in morgue parking lots and comparing self-harm scars, but Pete’s just a dude in a band who likes dorky jokes and homemade t-shirts. He gets the sense that Jeanae likes him best when he’s depressed or angry, flinging clever words like he hopes he’ll choke on them, and she’s been disappointed the rest of the time. “No one will ever love you again, no one will ever break the curse, and everyone will know forever that you are poison!”

Pete doesn’t care about what Jeanae thinks of him right now. Grave nettles? _Grave nettles?!_ Spinning _a coat_ out of _flax_ out of _grave nettles_? He doesn’t know how to do ANY of that shit. Outside of a Renaissance faire he doesn’t know how to find anyone who does. He is _losing his fucking mind_. “Patrick is going to turn back into a swan in _less than twelve hours_ , Jeanae, and I really don’t fucking care if I’m spoiling your shitty aesthetic!”

There’s a silence over the line. Jeanae’s voice is different, small and without sting, when she repeats, “Patrick?”

“Your curse missed,” Pete says, his voice choking thick with his tangle of emotions.

“He’s a swan? The worst and ugliest part of Patrick’s heart—is a swan?”

“Swans can be jerks,” Pete says.

“Inside his heart, his secret wicked self is a _swan_. The pure-white symbol of grace and beauty. Sacred to the gods of music and love.”

Pete thinks Jeanae is belaboring the wrong point here. He’s also feeling the tiniest bit defensive. Patrick’s not _perfect_. He’s crabby, like, 98% of his waking hours. “Swans like, hiss and stuff. And he made a real mess of the bathroom.”

“Oh, god,” Jeanae says. She sounds upset for the first time in this whole fiasco. She sounds _sorry_. “You’re never going to be able to break this curse.”

“But nettles,” Pete says. His heart rate’s speeding again. He steals another glance through the bedroom door. Patrick is curled softly on his side, his eyelashes fluttering, his head cradled by pillows. He is the picture of innocence. He is so fucking beautiful. “I’ll pick nettles, and I’ll burn my hands, and I’ll like, learn to spin from a medieval housewife, and—”

“It’s not just nettles and coats,” Jeanae says. “There’s more.” Her voice falters. “From—from the moment you commence your task. Until it is finished. Even should it occupy years of your life. You must not speak. The first word you utter will… will pierce through the heart of him like a deadly dagger. His life hangs upon your tongue.”

God, just when you think your life can’t get any weirder, just when you’re cresting into the first blush of weird and confusing fame for your little band and you’ve never had a real job or a real life and you still live with your parents more often than not, just when you’re breaking up with your on-again-off-again girlfriend for good, just when you’re grappling with some truly fucked-up realizations about what love is and who you feel it for—that’s when your best friend gets turned into a swan. Of _course_ it fucking is.

Oh, and—if you speak a single word? You’ll kill him.

There’s no air in Pete’s lungs. He’s dizzy, he’s sick. “What about texting?” he croaks. It’s the first thing he can think of. “Can I like, write things down?”

Jeanae _tsk_ s, like this is exactly what annoys her most about Pete. “Spells are about _intention_ , Peter. You really want to be a smartass with Patrick’s life on the line?”

But Pete’s not trying to be a smartass. Pete’s trying to breathe.

Pete’s just trying to breathe.

*

He goes into Patrick’s bedroom. He doesn’t speak. He’ll have to get used to that.

Pete slides into the bed beside Patrick. Their heads make mirrors on the pillowcase. Patrick blinks, his gaze serious but idle. He’s different, in these first few moments after the transformation. Some essential humanity is absent, some urgency gone. He is a little less himself, quiet and contented in an uncharacteristic way.

Impulsively, Pete burrows his face into Patrick’s chest, presses his cheek to Patrick’s heartbeat, does not cry.

“Why was I a swan?” Patrick asks. He’s starting to take shape again, lying here with Pete. That sharp, skeptical edge is creeping back into his voice. It’s his default suspicious-of-Pete’s-bullshit voice. Pete is struck by how dear this is to him, Patrick’s arch wariness, Patrick’s total certainty that if something inexplicable is going on, it’s probably Pete’s fault. These are the things you miss about a person: their edges. Their cynicism. Their worst habits are their most charming, after an absence. What a luxury it is now to be sniped at by Patrick Grump.

What would it be like to slip skins? To become such a strange shape? Pete, who’s hated his own body so much for so long that it eclipses important truths about other bodies, lets his fingertips float along Patrick’s side, grazing the surface of the dips and curves of his friend’s dear form. He doesn’t want Patrick to be a swan, obviously. The reasons for that are simple and also complicated.

“Hey,” Patrick says, grabbing Pete’s curious hand off his hips. “Why the _fuck_ was I just a swan?”

“It’s my fault,” Pete whispers numbly into Patrick’s chest. “I swear to you, I will put it right.”

And the vow is made. The task begun.

Now that he can’t speak, it seems like he’s forgotten to say something important.

*

“What are we doing, Pete?” Patrick asks for the nth time, raising his voice to be heard over the wind rushing in through the broken car window. Pete, of course, does not answer. Pete grips the steering wheel hard, terrified that he’ll slip up and, by reflex, answer. His mouth is copper with his bitten blood. There’s nothing wrong with his _ability_ to speak, nothing stopping him. The consequences are just a lot more literally destructive than usual.

One mistake would cost him everything. And Pete is more or less famous for his expensive mistakes.

Patrick, by now completely restored to his usual irritable self, is unmoved by Pete’s silence. “Oh great, another cemetery,” he says sarcastically as Pete pulls into a parking lot. “So glad you’re dragging me around creepily in the middle of the night to fucking CEMETERIES, all while ominously refusing to speak.”

Pete slams his jaw shut on his tongue before he can spit out that he didn’t ask Patrick to come along, that Patrick actually followed him down the block and into Pete’s car hollering, and frankly invited himself along on this morbid quest without permission.

Pete bites his tongue again before he can say how glad he is that Patrick’s with him. That Patrick has arms instead of wings and pale milk skin instead of feathers. That Patrick exists in the world generally, and at Pete’s side specifically.

Pete bites his tongue and fists his fingernails into his palms. He gets out of the car. Using his cell phone as a flashlight, he begins to search another graveyard for stinging nettles.

*

Pete is Pete, which means he’s careless. It’s not til the first blush of fleshy gold splits the skyline that he remembers sunrise.

What few nettles he’s gathered—and he’ll be checking Google later to make sure these even _are_ nettles, though they surely fucking sting—will have to be enough. He rushes Patrick back towards the car, unable to explain his hurry. Patrick is grumpy, overtired, slow. “’M fucking exhausted,” he grouses, moving like spilled syrup. Meanwhile Pete’s got arms full of nettles, a hoodie full of burrs and gravedirt, hands torn into blisters and blood from these evil fucking plants. He grits his teeth and does not speak.

“So, just to review,” Patrick says, buckling his seatbelt. “I have no idea what the fuck is going on; you’ve kept me out all night with no explanation; for an unknown reason you’re obsessively collecting plants that you’re, like, allergic to; and we’re supposed to meet at Joe’s in six hours for a writing session before our gig tonight. Oh, and _yesterday I was a fucking swan._ Do I have that right?”

Pete nods grimly. He’s only halfway listening. He’s racing the horizon. Maybe Jeanae was wrong: maybe the curse only lasts one day. Maybe he’ll get Patrick home before the changes.

Pete races the sun and comes in second place. He merges onto the Dan Ryan with a backseat full of nettles and a front seat full of swan. His hands crack and ooze on the wheel. The swan looks at Pete and asks sadly, “Blat?”

As he cries, Pete is careful not to make a sound.

*

“He’s still not answering his phone,” Andy says. Andy looks worried. It’s two hours past when they all agreed to meet, and Patrick is the most serious of any of them about punctuality. Seriously, he’s held lectures on the topic. Several lectures.

“Where the hell is he?” Joe, the second most serious about punctuality, asks for the nine hundredth time. At this point it’s purely rhetorical, Pete thinks: testament to Joe’s legendary capacity for exasperation. Unless Joe thinks this is the kind of curse that can be undone by one thousand repetitions of the same question. Pete, whose hands are puffed up like mittens just from _harvesting_ fucking nettles, can’t help but hope Joe’s onto something.

Joe stalks through his little basement apartment, glowering fiercely at anything in his path. “What the fuck is going on?” he demands of the room at large. Pete puts his hands up innocently and shrugs, as if to say, _please definitely don’t ask me_.

He’s kind of wishing, now, he’d sent them an explanation or made a quick phone call before embarking on this quest. Like, at least an email. But he thinks curses are like Fight Club. If he could explain himself, it wouldn’t work.

Pete knows exactly where Patrick is, of course. He’s in Pete’s car outside, cozy in a nest of bedsheets with a jumbo bag of Portillo’s fries. He’s also a swan. Pete’s pretty sure he’ll transform in time for their show tonight. He wishes he could tell Joe and Andy not to worry, or else to worry about a whole other thing than they’re worrying about now.

Except, of course, he can’t tell them anything.

“And _you_!” cries Joe, whirling on Pete. “You know something.”

Pete mimes innocence again. This is harder than you might think. His fingertips are bleeding a little, from the nettles, from his bass strings. He is literally red-handed. He looks like a cartoon of guilt.

“Joe, he’d tell us if he knew,” Andy says, stepping between them.

“When has he ever?” demands Joe. Fairly, Pete thinks. He sometimes struggles with… accuracy deficits. A certain vulnerability to… less than full disclosure. “Look at his fucked-up hands, Andrew! What happened there? Was he pulling kittens out of a burning building all night? And! And! Suddenly he’s not talking at _all_? When in his life has Pete _ever_ shut up before now?”

Andy gives Joe a sharp look. “When he’s depressed, usually,” he says pointedly. Pete feels complicated about Andy defending him: a mix of gratitude and unworthiness. He is powerless to express either.

Pete’s hands throb red like brands. He hurts, hurts. He wants to join in their plaintive cries of _where’s Patrick, where is Patrick_. He knows that Patrick’s return rests solely on him. He caused this curse. With his wickedness, he brought this down upon them. He hates being here, at this practice, when Patrick is not. He wishes he was breaking nettles down into flax, however that’s done. He wishes he was breaking himself open on the stinging hairs. He scratches at his burning skin, which sloughs off yellow and awful under his touch. However wretched he looks, he feels ten times that.

His tears land on his fiery hands like relief, and he does not deserve it. He scrubs at his eyes with his sleeve to stop the fall of tears.

“Aw, fuck,” Joe says, seeing him. “I’m sorry, Pete. What’s up, man?”

But Joe’s kindness is worse. Pete can’t bear it.

He grabs his bass and puts his peeling fingers to the strings. He carves out a raw, reverberating bassline, one to match the punch-drum of his choking heart. He won’t meet anyone’s eyes. He just plays, savoring the simultaneity of pain-and-release, until his friends join in. Their resident genius is a swan somewhere, cut off from the music, cut off from creation. It feels wrong, sour and bitter as a wound, but they play without him. Together they shape a song.


	3. all of our moves make up for the silence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had more fun writing this than anything since Girl Out Boy! I hope you guys enjoy it too.

When he gets to the venue, Pete stays in the car. He’s 24 years old and he’s hiding from his friends. He should be helping them unload and set up, with soundcheck, but instead he’s hanging out with a swan.

He spends some time breaking apart nettles, stripping them into fibrous strands, a stinging silk that will have to pass as flax. Whatever flax is. Maybe the library has a book on weaving. Maybe there’s a Youtube tutorial for DIY curse-breaking.

None of this is helping the situation with his hands very much. He won’t be able to scream tonight or sing in the chorus, and at this rate he’s not even going to be able to curl his fingers around the neck of his bass.

He feels so hopeless, his lap full of evil plants and his best friend something impossible. A week ago all he had to deal with was whether he should break up with Jeanae, writing a second album, and figuring out if how he felt about Patrick was how everyone feels about their best friend. Now it’s… now it’s all so fucked. It’s all so fucked he can’t even say how fucked it is.

Pete’s deep into his sorrow when something tugs his sleeve. It’s the swan biting his jacket, the swan he can’t quite think of as Patrick.

“Mhern,” complains the swan. Pete scoots, making space in the backseat with him and the ‘flax.’ He empties his lap of nettles. The swan maneuvers awkwardly to sit beside him. Its body is a solid warm presence at his side. It leans against him. It smells nothing like Patrick.

Pete hasn’t slept for almost two days. The swan is comforting, somehow. He’s just dozing off when the spatial arrangement of his car changes abruptly. Apparently the sun’s all the way set, because a full-size swan just became a full-size Patrick.

Instead of pulling away, Patrick presses up even harder against Pete. He leans his head on Pete’s shoulder. His voice blurs against Pete’s neck and he says, “Missed you,” in a sleepy, faraway voice.

Pete slips his arm around the swan. Around the Patrick. His eyes fall closed in relief.

*

Pete sleeps for maybe two seconds before Joe’s pounding on the car window, which is hardly necessary when one’s already broken. He could just shout through the preexisting gaping hole; no need to create his own. “YOU FOUND PATRICK!” Joe’s yelling, which is also unnecessary.

Patrick, shedding feathers, extricates himself from Pete and gets out of the car. Pete feels immediately colder for his absence. He tries not to be jealous of Joe, talking two hundred words per minute as he exclaims over and berates and expresses love for Patrick. It’s so easy for him, to tell Patrick everything—exactly what he means, what he feels. It highlights for Pete how, curse or no curse, he’s never been able to do that. Not with Patrick, anyway. He’s got words for the rest of the world easy enough.

“So did I interrupt something back here, or…?” Joe’s asking Patrick. Pete is tempted to bury his face in the poisonous pile of nettles, on the off chance it kills him and he doesn’t have to do this conversation.

Patrick, still a little slow and dopey from his 12 hours as a swan, repeats, “Interrupt something?”

Pete doesn’t even have to look to know Joe’s waggling his eyebrows all over the place. “You guys were like, _snuggling._ ”

Pete steals a look. Patrick’s tipping his head curiously. He looks exactly like a fucking swan. “Yes,” he says, perplexed. “We were.”

“So maybe you guys were back here mackin’ it, or having some kind of alleyway sex tryst, and I spoiled it.”

Patrick does a very convincing human version of a swan ruffling its feathers in alarm. Pete would like to laugh out loud, or push Joe into a lake, or ask him why he thinks either of them would do a thing like that. Does he think Patrick would _want_ to make out with Pete in an alley? Does he think Pete would?

Would Pete?

“Well, whatever we were doing, you _did_ spoil it,” Patrick says, and Pete doesn’t know why Patrick laughs, if it’s because he finds the idea agreeable or beyond preposterous. Pete’s all mixed-up about it. In this one moment, he’s relieved he doesn’t have to speak.

“You missed practice,” Joe says, finally changing the subject.

“I was somewhere else,” says Patrick vaguely.

“And Pete’s not talking. Or writing anything useful.” Joe’s the biggest fucking tattletale.

Patrick frowns back into the car, where Pete sits twisting bits of nettle together and testing its hold. Pete wishes again, fruitlessly, that he’d explained any of this to anyone, before he took a fatal vow of silence. This would be so much _fucking_ easier if anyone knew what the hell he was doing.

“Yeah, not to me either,” Patrick says. He stills sounds soft and gentle, more like a swan than a Patrick. “So we were sitting.”

Joe narrows his eyes. His mouth is thin. He looks from Pete to Patrick, as if the situation Patrick is proposing is colossally unlikely. What, like it’s weird for two bros to snuggle in the backseat of a shitty electric blue Eagle Talon with a pile full of graveyard weeds? Like _kissing_ is more likely?

Pete is possibly getting a little hung up on the kissing thing. He’s fallen out of the flow of the conversation entirely by the time Patrick comes over and touches his shoulder lightly. His movements are still so careful. He’s taking a long time to come back. Some part of the Patrick-spark is still buried up in feathers and down.

Pete looks up at Patrick, worried and confused and aching for something he can’t name. Patrick says gently, “Showtime.”

*

His bass is in his hands, the crowd is at his feet, and Patrick shines like Mars under the stage lights. Pete discovers there’s still one way he can communicate.

Music is communion, is the pure gold exchange of spirit, is his life and love and hope and meaning rising up out of him, getting caught up in the chords, and meeting the swollen, glorious meaning of all the others, mixed up together in the notes spinning above their heads. The music is so much more than the sum of Pete’s part, Andy’s part, Joe’s, Patrick’s. The music is so much more than any of them. It hits the people in the crowd, is reflected by their own hearts, growing, changing. Catching.

Pete moves through all this muddied meaning, moves towards Patrick, and instead of moving away, instead of the stage chase he likes to lead Pete on before submitting to Pete’s sweaty leans, tonight Patrick moves towards Pete in return. They meet in the middle, their foreheads tipping together, the music a platinum strand that thickens into a net, a bridge, a fucking nettle coat, holding them bound together. Patrick’s breath is on Pete’s face. Their hands move between them, Pete’s cracking and aching in a way that makes the music more real, and Patrick’s teeth shine in the lights. He pulls back, turning away from Pete to return to his microphone, to the song, and on the way his lips graze Pete’s cheek, too quick to tell whether it’s intended.

Pete has never played with so much of his heart as on this night when he has no other way to show himself. He does not speak to the crowd, does not play to the crowd, barely even faces them. Tonight he plays only for Patrick. Tonight he plays only for his swan.

*

They collapse into Pete’s bed, hollowed-out exhausted and vibrating with tight, sour energy at once. Pete doesn’t ask if Patrick wants to go back to his own apartment and Patrick doesn’t ask to go there. Patrick keeps catching Pete’s hands and stroking them, so careful of the many wounds. Pete strips off his wet, sweaty shirt before he falls to the mattress. He tries not to have any thoughts or feelings about it when Patrick does the same.

“All my clothes smell like goose shit,” Patrick says, when they’re horizontal and nose to nose in the dark. Pete can’t say why his heart’s beating so hard. “Swan shit, I guess,” Patrick corrects himself. The laugh that curls through his throat is low and rough and sexy. It is dangerous, to lay here with 20 year old Patrick, sleep-deprived and with a few precious hours til sunrise, and think about whether his laugh is sexy. Pete should get up, should work on the damn nettle coat. But when he rolls onto his back, as if to move out of the bed, Patrick’s hand lands on his chest. Bare skin to bare skin: electric. Pete is frozen in place by the current flowing through him.

Patrick props himself on one elbow, looks down at Pete. Pete is breathing fast and shallow, like he’s been running, like he’s scared. Probably both of those things are true.

“You know what happened to me, don’t you,” Patrick says. It’s not a question. “You know why I’m, like, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Swan?”

Pete tips his chin up and down in the barest nod. _Curses are about intention_ , he hears Jeanae saying. Does body language violate that intention? But he thinks about how their bodies moved on stage tonight, what Patrick’s body seems to be saying now and the strange yearning reply stretching through his own skin. Bodies are always talking. Unless Pete’s meant to be going around blindfolded too, what his body says can’t be against the rules.

Pete must be imagining things, because it seems like Patrick’s gaze keeps getting stuck on his mouth. Patrick has no reason to look at Pete’s mouth. Pete has no reason to have any particular feelings about it either way.

“I saw Jeanae tonight,” Patrick says next, and Pete knows for sure he’s imagining things. “After the show. I was carrying my amp out to the van and she stepped out of the shadows, scarier than ever, and asked me how I was feeling. She was so intense. I said I was fine—I don’t know, it seems like a bad idea to just tell people that you’ve been spending time as a swan lately—and she laughed like it was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. She said, ‘He’ll never be able to do it. Not even for you.’ And then—this freaked me out—she said ‘I’m sorry for your life.’”

Patrick’s so close Pete can feel his chest shuddering with breath. He doesn’t smell like a swan at all right now, Pete thinks distantly. He smells like sweat and his leather guitar strap and that fruity shampoo he uses. Pete keeps his eyes trained on Patrick’s face because he’s trying not to think about Patrick being shirtless.

“Why would she say that, Pete?” Patrick asks. His voice is so low now, little more than a whisper. He’s scared, Pete thinks. But he’s something else too. “Why can’t you talk to me?”

In this light, Patrick’s eyes are empty and endless and grey, the polished silver of an antique mirror. Pete could lose himself in there, trying to find Patrick. Pete closes his eyes, bites his lips for good measure. He doesn’t trust himself. He aches, he burns. He needs to start weaving. He needs to start sleeping. If he isn’t more careful, he’s going to make a mistake.

“You said it was your fault.” Patrick breathes the words. His gold-blond lashes catch the moonlight, flash back silver. Pete is dazzled. Pete is blind.

 _We broke up_ , Pete wants to say. _We broke up because she thought I was in love with you. We broke up because I thought so too. She cursed me and I deserved it. You’re a swan now. Of course you are. I’m so tired, and I’m trying so hard to save you._

What Pete says is nothing.

Pete’s eyes are closed and the heat of Patrick’s body lights up his skin. Patrick leans closer, he can tell from the heat, from how Patrick’s voice vibrates the air just above Pete’s face. If he opened his eyes he’d see the distance between their lips, and he knows he could not bear it.

“Pete,” Patrick whispers. “Today I—I struggled, when the sun withdrew and the dark tried to reach me. Something in me that wasn’t me, or that _was_ me, didn’t want to change back.” Pete doesn’t answer. Pete can’t. Patrick drops his forehead so it’s touching Pete’s, like they did on stage, only so, so different.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t understand what I feel,” says Patrick. There’s a long, taut pause. Then he asks, “Do you?”

Pete could kiss him. Pete could kiss him, and let that be an answer. There are still a few ways he can communicate, aren’t there?

But Pete’s scared too. Pete bites down harder on his lips, his own lips. Pete does not open his eyes.

Eventually, they fall asleep this way, half-dressed and cheek to cheek. When Pete wakes, all he finds lying beside him is a swan.


	4. i’m getting you, i’m losing me

Three hours of sleep is going to have to be enough. Pete rises with the sun. Who could fall back asleep, with their best friend cursed into a swan nestled on the pillow beside them? He pulls his comforter around the swan, worried it—he—will get cold without Pete’s body heat, and gets to work.

Twisting the nettle has no real effect other than shredding Pete’s fingertips like mozzarella, so he tries knotting it. This works better, though tiny plant hairs keep working painfully under his fingernails and punishing the tender flesh. He gets clumsier, the more stung and swollen and numb his fingers become. He tugs the same knots over and over to tighten them, not able to bear holding on too long. He works til he’s on fire with pain, til his grip is slick with lymph and blood, til his vision blurs and swims from such detailed work. He works until he can work no longer, and he has produced only an inch or two of weave.

Pete chokes down his frustration. He’d feel so much better if he could just scream. He showers instead, letting too-hot water hit his back like curses he cannot say, oaths he cannot speak. Even thinking about curses raises goosebumps on his arms, chill-and-heat competing across his exposed skin in a way he finds distracting. Under the spray, Pete’s mind keeps filling with the image of Patrick as he was last night: half-naked in moonlight, softer and whiter than any coat of feathers, frightened and sparking with something unnamed, his head and heartbeat touching-close. Pete’s penis fills with blood without his permission, his belly tightening with desire he dare not understand. His hands hurt too much to touch himself with any kind of satisfying pressure or friction. He is careful, careful, slow. He bites down his own growls of frustration, of need. Gingerly he strokes the sides of himself, indulging in brief, bright bursts of pain with every squeeze of his shaft.

He’s getting somewhere, almost, when the bathroom door swings open and the swan waddles in.

Pete freezes with his chapped hand around his dick. The swan looks right at him. Pete has no way of knowing what it thinks, feels, understands—how much of it is really Patrick.

_Patrick._

Pete turns away, hoping the damn bird won’t watch, and doesn’t care about how the friction hurts his hand anymore. He squeezes his eyes shut til he sees stars, sees the way Patrick looked onstage, spent and sweaty, panting from exertion and so full, so human, so alive. The pain almost—yes—it helps. His fingerprints slick red and run. Pete finishes in silence, in a veiny cherry throb, and his mind flashes unbidden to the sight of feathers on his pillowcase, their shirts puddled on his floor.

When Pete turns off the water, the swan is gone. Pete very carefully thinks nothing of it. He towels himself off, slathers lotion on his burning hands, and gets back to work.

*

The next few days are mostly a blur of weaving nettles, substituting dangerous quantities of caffeine for sleep, and avoiding all other responsibilities. Pete takes breaks to plunge his hands into buckets of ice water and, um, definitely not masturbate while thinking about how his pillowcase has begun to smell like Patrick’s hair. He spends nights with Patrick, trying not to notice how it’s taking Patrick longer and longer to come back—how long Patrick stays curled up and uncurious and hissy like a swan before he starts to return to focus and starts to do Patrick things again, like tug on the brim of his cap, embark on rambling, poorly told stories, and blush if Pete looks at him too hard. The only benefit to the extended periods of swan-ness is that Patrick, as a swan, is much more snuggly that Patrick as a human. Pete takes him to graveyards where he follows Pete around and complains while Pete picks nettles. They watch movies and Patrick feeds him popcorn so his bandages don’t get greasy. Each night, Patrick washes the wounds on his hands. Each night, they fall asleep face-to-face in Pete’s bed, the distance between them shrinking infinitesimally each time.

Each night until last night.

Last night Patrick sat balled up on the edge of Pete’s bed, shaking his head so hard it had to hurt. It was 5:26am, sunrise bearing down upon them, when Patrick started saying “No.” He said, “Take me home, I want to go home. I won’t sleep. Not again. I’m a person, not a swan. I won’t be a swan.”

Pete broke open. Any penalty less than Patrick’s life, he would have spoken. The only thing he had was his body, the only comfort he could offer. He knelt on the floor and pressed his face into Patrick’s knees. He stroked Patrick’s calves with his wrecked hands, grinding his forehead back and forth across the kid’s kneecaps. The transformation was worse when Patrick was awake, Pete knew by then. There was so much fearful, pained squawking.

Pete is weaving as fast as he possibly can.

It’s not fast enough.

“I don’t want to disappear again,” Patrick moaned, and his hands found Pete’s shoulder and hauled Pete up onto the bed beside him. “Tell me I’ll come back,” Patrick begged, gripping Pete’s body, his tear-streaked, beautiful face less than inches from Pete’s own. “Please, Pete. Just tell me that I’ll come back. I’ll never ask you to say anything to me ever again if you just tell me this.”

And Pete said nothing.

Patrick collapsed into Pete’s chest, weeping, and Pete stroked the back of his head, stroked his shoulders, stroked his spine, stroked the strip of skin where Patrick’s shirt pulled up and revealed precious softness. Pete canvassed all of Patrick’s body that he could reach, and when he ran out, Patrick turned his wet face up to Pete’s and pressed a wet, starving kiss against Pete’s lips. A sob ripped out of him, breaking the kiss before Pete could decide whether to return it.

“Pete, I—” said Patrick.

Pete’s eyes, softly closed with lashes against cheeks, opened slow. He needed the rest of the sentence. He needed to know what Patrick would say. He needed to know if Patrick was only terrified, wanting to feel human, wanting to feel something searing that might lead him back at nightfall, or if Patrick _meant_ it. He needed to know if Patrick would kiss him again.

But that’s not how curses work.

Patrick’s shape changed in Pete’s arms, a violent collapse into feathers and hollow bones. A scream neither human nor animal filled the apartment. Pete flinched, pushing himself back from his friend, back from the sound and convulsions of murder.

A moment later, Pete stared into those unblinking black swan eyes, wishing desperately he knew what Patrick was thinking. Feathers fell down around them like snow. The swan, being a swan, said nothing.

*

Pete didn’t sleep last night. Not after that. Not with his lips more burnt from Patrick’s kiss than his hands are from a week of nettles, not with Patrick’s tears wet on his breast, not with shitty fucking _swan feathers_ absolutely fucking everywhere.

Instead he went back to his weaving. He’s pouring anti-inflammatories directly from the bottle into his mouth, now. He is not concerned about _do not exceed daily dosages_. His life narrows to nettles, to weaving a fucking _coat_ , to saving Patrick. At any cost, he will save Patrick. What does the longevity of your stomach lining matter when the person you love most in the world is a goddamned _swan_?

So when Andy barges in around 11 am, while Pete’s taking a brief ice soak for his hands? When Andy barges in looking frantic and furious both, and before he even says hello he starts yelling? Oh, Pete is _so_ not in the fucking mood.

“Okay, Peter, that’s fucking enough!” barks Andy. Andy’s a skinny guy, but he’s coming at Pete like a linebacker. Pete jumps up, stumbles back, holds his dripping ice-water hands out like shields, like they could possibly stop anything.

But they do, in fact, stop Andy.

“What the hell,” gasps Andy, peering at the ruin of Pete’s hands. “We need to get you to a doctor. They’ve gotten so much worse!”

Pete shakes his head, tries to convey without speech that he’s fine, perfectly fine, and there’s no need to worry. This is harder to mime than you’d think. He knows he doesn’t look well, dressed in dirty clothes, barely sleeping, eating less. He knows he doesn’t look terribly convincing.

“You’ve missed the last four practices and no one’s seen Patrick in days,” Andy says. His voice is careful but stern, like Pete’s a half-tamed animal, dangerous if spooked. “And now I think you have some kind of leprosy.”

Pete gestures to the pile of nettles, wanting to be able to explain at least some part of this mess. It’s not til he sees Andy’s face that he realizes ‘mad arts & crafts project made of plants’ is probably not reassuring Andy of his groundedness to reality.

Andy takes a step closer; Pete takes a step back. Pete needs to get the bedroom door closed before the swan comes out to investigate. He already knows that even could he speak, he could not possibly explain the presence of a tame adult swan in his apartment. Not even Pete Wentz could spin that one into something casual and unworrying.

“I ran into Jeanae,” Andy says, and Pete freezes. Shit, shit, shit. Nothing good has _ever_ followed those words. “At her house. Okay, I went to her house. Looking for you! As a concerned friend! And she told me you broke up and you put your hand through a car window. And, uh. I kind of agree with her assessment that you’re not taking it very well.”

If Pete ever gets to speak again, the very first thing he’ll do is curse Jeanae right back. _She_ could have explained the situation to Andy. Hell, she could explain it to _everyone_. At any time. There’s nothing stopping her. She could at _least_ give him the address of a Wicca shop where he can just fucking _buy_ grave nettles. But no, instead of any of these _helpful_ contributions, she decides to make Andy question his mental stability and send him here, to a scene of precarious mental stability indeed. This kind of shit is just one of _so many reasons_ they broke up.

Pete keeps edging towards the bedroom, trying to be sneaky but also acknowledging that stealth is literally impossible in this situation.

“You’re coming with me,” Andy commands. “You’re getting out of this weird-smelling apartment and you’re coming to Joe’s, and we are preparing for our goddamn show tonight, and you are not making any more weird clothes out of poison oak or whatever the hell you’re doing. Okay?”

Pete makes a wild sprint for the bedroom. Andy springs into action after him. Pete gets the door closed just as Andy smacks into him from behind; they both crash into the door. The noise is tremendous. Pete’s face gets smashed into the wood, Andy’s body weight driving him spread-eagle. The doorknob is in his guts.

The noise of this collision is not insignificant.

From inside the room, there comes an alarmed “ _HNNNK_?”

Andy’s still got Pete pinned on the door. They’re both a little out of breath from the high-speed chase. “Pete,” Andy says, directly into Pete’s ear and not without menace, “what was that?”

In Pete’s silence, they hear webbed feet pattering across the floor on the other side of the door. Much closer and louder, they hear again, “ _HNNNNNNNK?_ ”

There’s a brief, furious scuffle over the doorknob. Pete tries to block Andy from reaching it and Andy ultimately turns Pete’s wrists with his hand, forcing the doorknob clutched in Pete’s palm to turn too. They just about collapse into the room as the door they’re putting all their weight on falls in. The swan, startled, shits as it propels itself terrifyingly into the air. Its wingspan is massive. Things fall off Pete’s shelves. The sound of a swan taking flight inside a small bedroom is not unlike a sonic boom. The swan screams as its wings collide with furniture, with walls. It hurtles earthward, landing on Pete’s bed in a chorus of terrified squawking and property damage.

From the floor, Andy says, “That’s—that is a swan.”

Pete makes no answer. For once, he has nothing to add.

The swan is clearly upset. It stands on Pete’s bed, all eight feet of its wingspan flapping angrily. It buffets them with the winds of its discontent and hisses with great vim.

_It’s Andy_ , Pete wishes he could say. _You know Andy_. But he has no idea if that’s true.

The first day, he and the swan had fun together, eating fries and Googling mealworms. He’d teased the swan, made jokes it reacted to. There’d been a degree of companionable, linguistic interaction that exceeded what you’d expect from the average wild swan. Now, the swan’s eyes are dull, its body drab and oily. It spends most of its time sleeping or paddling around Pete’s bathtub. Its interest in French fries is decreasing as its interest in raw spinach rises. It’s been getting meaner. Pete can’t shake the feeling that the swan is becoming less and less Patrick, more and more swan, every day. He didn’t think to ask Jeanae what would happen if he didn’t break the curse fast enough. He lives in dread of the night Patrick just… never turns back.

The nettle coat is nowhere near finished. Generously, it could be called a sleeveless vest. He’s been having to drive farther and farther out of the city to find graveyards. He’s harvesting nettles faster than they can grow.

Pete feels so emptied, here on his bedroom floor with the swan screaming over them. He could close his eyes and sleep right here. He is so, so exhausted.

There’s no one to soothe the swan but Pete, so it doesn’t matter if he’s exhausted. He swipes an oversize hoodie off the floor on his way to his feet and tosses it gently over the chaos of bird on his bed. In the darkness, the swan’s movements immediately become less violent. Pete moves within range of those deadly wings to stroke the swan gently through the hoodie. It quiets quickly under his silent touch.

None of this is helping his case with Andy.

“If I ask you what the hell is going on here,” Andy says, “you’re not going to answer, are you.”

Pete doesn’t even look away from the swan. It presses into his touch, making content settling-in noises. It always gets sleepy when he covers its head. He imagines throwing a hoodie over Patrick’s face when he’s angry and has to bite back a laugh. Patrick would be fucking furious.

Another wave of helplessness and fatigue crashes over Pete. This time, it drags him under.

His lips burn where Patrick kissed them. Desperate, pleading. And Pete saying nothing. Pete not even kissing back.

Pete starts to cry. Seems like all he’s been doing lately: crying, weaving nettles, creeping through graveyards, trying to act cheerful for Patrick when he’s here. Crying some more. God, he really should be getting more sleep.

Andy’s at his side then. “I don’t know how to help you,” he sighs. He sounds crabby and resigned. “I don’t even know if I should be bringing you and your insane pet to a wildlife rescue or a medical doctor right now. But I promised Joe I’d get you to our show tonight, so… So don’t make me carry you, okay? That ends bad for both of us.”

Andy nudges Pete’s shoulder until he finally looks up and meets his friend’s worried brown eyes. Andy tucks a long curl behind his ear. “C’mon. I’ll even carry your equipment for you. Just—let’s go. Get you out of this apartment for a minute. We’ll figure out the rest later. We’ll talk... later.”

Something in Andy’s voice implies it doesn’t matter, really, whether Pete ever chooses to speak again. He’ll be there anyway. That’s when Pete figures out that isn’t a kidnapping or an intervention. This is just—friendship.

Andy’s worried about him.

Andy kind of should be.

Pete doesn’t have any fight left in him. He pats the swan’s head one last time and nods. He tries to flex his fingers and finds that they won’t bend. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. He’ll play the show. He’ll make his friends happy. And then he’s going to weave without respite until this fucking coat is finished and he gets Patrick back, and he doesn’t care if it kills him.

*

_the secrets i can’t speak would run this city for a week. im the new higher power, baby. hide ur chernobyl eyes & lets meltdown_

Pete doodles lyrics onto his skin, haptic feedback from his fingertip all muddied, his arm registering the numb blistered touch like it’s a stranger’s. There are so many songs in him, and sorrows. So many words he dare not put to page. So many words it feels like he’ll never get to say.

Pete’s losing it, a little. Pete’s already lost.

_what is, what is, what was the thing with feathers? i dont remember. fletch an arrow, aim it at my heart. im telling you this whole town is coming apart. cupid count the chambers in a swan’s chest, cupid curse the person who i love best. meltdown. lets meltdown._

Joe has already tried interrogating him. He keeps shrugging, looking away. Finally, Joe resorts to yes or no questions, and Pete shakes his head or nods in answer, not knowing if these movements are daggers in Patrick’s tiny bird heart.

“Will you talk to us?”

Shake.

“What is going _on_ with you?”

Shrug.

“Fuck. Is—is everything okay?”

Shake.

“What can we do? Shit, I mean, can we do anything?”

Shake.

Joe sits on the amp next to Pete and sighs. He squints up at Pete and Pete can see exactly what he’s thinking. He’s thinking _what cosmic short straw did I draw to have to deal with this today._ Pete thinks it wouldn’t be a bad lyric.

“Do you know where Patrick is?”

Nod.

“Is _he_ okay?”

Shake. Nod. Shake. Shrug. Half a nod + half a shrug.

“Will he be here in time for the set?”

Crossed fingers.

Joe sighs again. “We don’t have shit without him.”

Nod. Enthusiastic nod.

*

Patrick doesn’t make the show.

 

 


	5. we do it in the dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter on Jan 19 while I was waiting for MANIA to drop! You can imagine how pleased I was about the graveyard scene when I saw/heard Church for the first time. ***lechery***

Pete hits his favorite graveyard on the way home. On one hand (one burned, immobile hand), he’s dying to see if Patrick is okay, if he’s stuck as a swan or if he made it back for another night. On the other, he can’t bear to face what’s waiting for him in his apartment, and he’s out of nettles.

Turns out he needn’t have worried. “There’s the graverobber,” a voice comes from behind him while he’s hacking at the base of a plant with scissors. “Still better than a cradlesnatcher, right?”

Pete jumps—a common reaction in a dark graveyard when you supposed you were alone, he thinks—and whirls around. Before him stands Patrick.

Patrick’s dressed in fresh clothes, a baseball cap and zip hoodie. His hands are in his pockets. Pete can smell him on the cool night air. Pete is so relieved to see he’s a human again.

“I couldn’t go to the show,” Patrick says. His voice is like glass. “I went to my apartment and took a shower instead. I haven’t bathed as a human in, like, a week. I wanted fresh clothes, my clothes.” He holds his arms out in front of him, his hands fisted in the sleeves, showing Pete the fabric. “This is my favorite hoodie. I wanted to wear it again. Before I—before—”

The glass breaks. Patrick’s voice cracks and shatters. “Fuck,” he mumbles. He rolls up his sleeves and holds his hands out to Pete.

They’re feathered.

“It’s not everywhere,” Patrick says, studying his shoes. “Just, um—just the hands. For now.”

Patrick’s face burns with so much fear and so much shame. Pete takes one of his hands carefully, carefully. He turns it over. It’s not so bad, really. Five or ten feathers per hands. Experimentally, he tugs one. Patrick makes a noise of discomfort, but not pain. Pete tugs harder and the feather comes out.

He holds it up in the moonlight. The calamus, the shaft, is empty—bloodless. Pete thinks this means that it was just stuck in Patrick’s skin, not growing out of him like a hair would. Pete thinks this means they still have time.

He taps the hollow shaft and tries to show Patrick, without words, that it’s not the end yet. Patrick looks at him, not understanding, full of such fear. Pete takes Patrick’s hand again and, quick and brutal, plucks the rest of the feathers out of it. He’s surprised he has the fine motor control to do it. He can’t bear to fumble his grip and cause Patrick pain. When one hand is done, he starts on the other. Like symbolism in a modern novel Pete doesn’t understand, they stand on graves with feathers raining down around them.

Once his hands look fully human again, Patrick rubs them together, holds them to the light. “Thank you,” he says. He’s shivering, though the night’s not cold. “For everything. Really. I knew you’d be in this damn graveyard, you’re here every night. You’ve—you’ve done so much for me. I don’t understand it all, but I know how hard you worked to save me. It just—it’s just not enough, Pete.”

Pete doesn’t know how Patrick’s eyes can be so dry through all of this. “I think this is my last night,” he tells Pete solemnly.

Forget the nettles. Pete has other things to do.

Pete catches Patrick by the chin, his chapped hand rough against swan-soft skin, and kisses his best friend directly on the mouth. He’s too scared and sleep-deprived to remember how long it’s been he’s wanted to, to remember any of the reasons that used to stop him. If this is Patrick’s last night, Pete will spend it with him. Pete will spend it however he wants.

Patrick kisses back like a man with every intention of putting his human tongue to all possible uses before he loses it for good. Patrick kisses back with such ferocious hunger that it doesn’t matter if he’s skilled—and oh. He’s skilled.

Patrick kisses back like he wants nothing more than to hear Pete make a sound.

Pete bites Patrick’s tongue, trying for his own, and Patrick pulls back laughing, sucking Pete’s lip, kissing a fevered line down Pete’s jaw and to the vulnerable hollow of his throat, where Patrick bites back. “If there’s one thing last nights are good for, it’s this,” he says against Pete’s skin. He guides Pete’s hand to his belt and Pete thinks he’s blacking out, because this can’t possibly be happening. Patrick plucks Pete’s pierced nipple through his t-shirt with surprising directness. This is the hottest thing that has ever happened in Pete’s life. He wishes he could stop thinking about how they’re standing on a few feet of dirt, a fancy box, and some rotting corpses, but hey, it’s better than thinking about the sunrise.

He fumbles Patrick’s belt—the buckle is beyond him—and Patrick lets out a frustrated grunt, nipping at his neck again. What Patrick is doing to his nipple is making Pete’s knees weak. Not thinking about what he’s doing, because it’s insane and surely any moment now he’ll wake up or Patrick will stop him, Pete slides his burned hand inside Patrick’s pants.

Suddenly it’s like he can feel with every fine nerve, as if his hand is undamaged. Each centimeter of skin yields miles of sensation. The concave overhang of Patrick’s hipbone, the wiry hair, the thick insistent warmth of—yes, fuck, yes—Patrick’s cock. Pete wants to laugh or shout or sing, he feels so joyful, he feels so _atlastatlastIneverInever_. Pete kisses into Patrick’s mouth all the things he cannot say, the delirium of sounds he cannot make. Pete runs his fingers so lightly across Patrick, the heat and the wholeness, and wishes he could do more. It’s the same friction problem he’s been having at home, only there’s nothing about his pain that’s likely to gratify Patrick.

Then Pete remembers: he may not be able to use it to speak, but he’s got a mouth capable of many wonders.

He drops to his knees so Patrick can marvel at it.

“You don’t have to,” Patrick gasps as Pete tugs his pants off his hips, exposing his perfect pale ass to the night. “Pete, Pete. Really. You don’t owe—”

_Owe_? This is nothing about owing. Even the nettles are nothing about owing. This is—this is just love. This is just the wild, desperate, stupid love that’s been clawing up Pete’s chest, wrecking him, since the two of them met. This is a natural like gravity. This is longing. This is a ward against loss. This is communion.

This is in case it’s the last chance he gets.

Here, now, tonight? Pete can’t believe he ever waited so long.

He grins up at Patrick in the moonlight and licks his lips. Patrick’s fingertips bite bruising-deep into his shoulders. Patrick’s breathing like they’ve just carried all their equipment up to Pete’s third floor apartment. Never mind the feathers beneath Pete’s knees. This is a good moment.

Pete fills his mouth with Patrick.

*

Pete drives home with Patrick rubbing him through his pants. It’s a miracle they make it alive. They burst into the apartment lobby, Patrick kissing him into the wall, up against the water-stained wallpaper, Patrick squeezing his dick denim-rough. It’s not til Patrick’s undoing the button on Pete’s jeans that the thought somehow penetrates Pete’s brain: Patrick deserves better than this filthy hallway and shoes caked with grave dirt. If they’re going to do this, they should probably do it right.

Except, of course, Pete’s never done this before.

Pete doesn’t know how to do it right.

Pete opens his eyes, which are pointed at the ceiling. Patrick’s fingers are dipping low into his pants. His vision swims and blurs. His heart—forget it. It’s pulped itself against his ribs. There’s no oxygen or blood held back for his brain, it’s all burning-bright the trail of Patrick’s touch, and he can’tspeakwon’tspeak so it’s hard to interrupt, and—

and his dick is in Patrick’s hand and he’s thinking _atlastatlastIneverInever_ and it’s so good, so fucking good—

and then, above where Patrick’s teeth are clamped to Pete’s willing collarbone, he feels something new. It is hot and it is wet. It is Patrick, crying.

Pete puts one hand on each of Patrick’s shoulders. Firmly, because his body now is all he has to speak with and he dare not mix these messages, he pushes Patrick away. He holds Patrick at arm’s length. Patrick’s face is a question, tears glitter-bright on his sharply cut cheeks; then his expression resolves into hurt.

He lifts his hands from Pete’s waist and holds them up like Pete’s wearing a badge and a gun. “What?” he asks, petulant, angry. “When you sucked me off in a graveyard, I thought that meant you wanted me?”

Pete raises one hand to the tear track on Patrick’s left cheek. He touches the wet, shows the residual snowglobe shine to Patrick. He raises his eyebrow, meaning, _you okay though?_ This would be a hell of a time to know sign language.

Patrick breaks Pete’s grip on him, spinning away. His arms close defensively over his chest. “Whatever,” he mutters. He scrubs his face with a sleeve. “I just wanted to—feel alive. Feel human. This last time.” When he faces away from Pete, truths tumble off his tongue. “You don’t know what it’s like. Being _gone_. I come back from so far away. The swan—it’s me, Pete. It’s me and it’s not and I can’t tell the difference. Every day I lose sight of the border a little more. I’m forgetting the road home.”

His voice desperate and without defense, Patrick tells the blank wall in front of him, “Let’s drive to Alaska. The sun doesn’t rise there, does it? Dark for half the year. Maybe there I wouldn’t—maybe I wouldn’t—”

Pete’s fingertips alight on Patrick’s shoulder, and he turns at last. But it’s not like Pete expects: all the softness slams shut when Patrick sees Pete’s wet, anguished eyes. He sees Pete’s failure, the reflection of his own fear, the helplessness and the loss. Patrick sees it all, all the tangled shit Pete has been unable to say, and Patrick recoils.

Patrick’s lip curls into a sneer. He grabs the collar of Pete’s jacket and smashes their faces together, kissing Pete without kindness. “I only want sympathy in the form of you crawling into bed with me,” he snarls. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. _Fuck_ me, or I’ll find someone else who will.”

Pete’s world is spinning too fast for him to hold onto. But—of all the things he wants and all the things he’s always been scared to name, he knows he doesn’t want Patrick like this.

But he can’t say that. Of course he can’t.

Pete stands alone in the lobby for a long time after Patrick storms out.

Then he goes upstairs. He gets himself off, trying not to cry, and goes back to his weaving.

What the fuck else is he supposed to do?

*

The damn coat is nearly finished when Pete gets the call.

He weaves all night, hoping Patrick will return. He doesn’t want Patrick out there alone, frightened without comfort at the moment of sunrise. But what does Pete have to offer him, without a finished coat? When he’s already denied Patrick the anonymous use of his body, the only thing Patrick asked of him. Pete has nothing, nothing without this coat. He is no fucking good to Patrick unless he finishes—the fucking—

So Pete works, his mouth searing to compete with his hands, and hopes.

It’s well into the afternoon when the call comes. Pete’s slept all of 30 minutes, eaten a folded slice of cold, old pizza , and worked. Tying and tugging knots, breaking nettles into flax, bursting blisters open when his fingers get too tight to flex. At a certain point the pain doesn’t matter anymore. It becomes meditative. _This_ , this is how he feels for Patrick. _This_ , this is how much he cares. _This_ is his love. _This_ is his penance. _This_ is the thorn through his heart. Pete bleeds, and Pete weaves, and Pete waits for the door the open and Patrick to come through it. Even though the sun is up. Even though it’s impossible.

Pete works on the final sleeve.

The call comes. Pete answers, then doesn’t know why. What’s he supposed to do to let the other person know he’s on the line? He’s in a very voicemail place right now. Pete thinks about clicking his tongue on the roof of his mouth, but then is frozen is paranoia that using his tongue to make any sound at all will violate the intention set by the curse.

“Hello? Pete? Hello?” Joe’s voice comes crabby over the line. Pete panics and bites the mouthpiece of his phone, clacking his teeth against the mic. He hasn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time since Patrick got turned into a swan. He’s not doing his best thinking. He’s never felt as desperate in his life.

Somehow Joe correctly interprets the weird clicking as a sign that Pete is listening. “Pete, you need to come over right away,” Joe says. “It’s Patrick.”

Pete doesn’t need to hear anything else. Just in case, he grabs the nearly-finished coat on his way out the door.


	6. out of my body and flying above

The scene at Joe’s is not something Pete could have prepared for.

Some highlights:

  * Joe is wearing oven mitts. (It is unclear how this is supposed to help the situation.)
  * There is an unrolled tube of paper towels strewn across the floor.
  * Also on the floor: what appears to be every cloth towel Joe owns, from hand-sized to full bath.
  * Joe is holding oven tongs, an extension cord tied into a kind of lasso, and a shoe.
  * There are feathers everywhere.
  * And Ritz crackers.
  * The floor is wet. Really wet. In kind of a swan-piss smelling way.
  * The air is torn apart by swan screams.



Joe wrenches open the door, looking feral, his eyes wild and rolling as he lets Pete in. “THERE’S A SWAN IN MY HOUSE,” he hollers. “I THOUGHT IT WAS PATRICK BUT IT IS MEANER THAN PATRICK.”

There are questions Pete wishes he could ask, like: _meaner than Patrick? Really?_ and _why do you think the swan is Patrick?_ Pete can’t ask any questions, so instead he steps tentatively into Joe’s apartment.

The apartment is basically destroyed. It looks exactly like a scared swan with an eight-foot iron wingspan has been rampaging through it. Don’t ask Pete how he knows that. Suffice to say the transformation isn’t an easy one, when Patrick’s awake.

Joe presses Pete the shoe into Pete’s hands. “For—for clobbering,” he says vaguely. Pete lets the shoe drop to the ground when Joe spins away in a defensive crouch. An ominous shadow has filled the doorway. A loud hiss shatters the tension in the room. The inexorable _plat, plat_ of webbed footsteps heralds the swan’s terrible, destructive arrival.

Based on the towel situation, Pete guesses Joe has tried the maneuver of ‘cover angry bird with blanket,’ only he can see at a glance what went wrong: Joe definitely underestimated the size blanket needed to restrain the wings, and he didn’t get close enough to cover the swan’s head. Basically, he’s just been lobbing towels at an angry, destructive bird. This is not a strategy swan experts recommend.

Pete hates that he’s become the swan expert of his friend group. Really he does.

Joe is spinning the lasso, picking up momentum. _For clobbering_ , he said. Nothing about this strategy seems advisable. Joe is not going to be able to take down this swan in hand-to-hand combat. His whole approach is predicated on a terrible idea.

But the swan is approaching, reared up and fearsome. There are no towels or blankets for gentle submission within reach. Pete has no voice to use for soothing. Pete has only his body. He’s made the mistake of holding it back before. This time, he gives it gladly for Patrick.

He kneels before the oncoming swan and lets it rush him, hissing and flapping, biting and screaming. He is buffeted by the impact of wings, nearly enough to knock him over and certainly bruising. He is bitten. He lets the swan charge in close, and he closes his arms around it. He hugs it tight to his chest. He allows the swan to rage. The blows fall down around him, and Pete absorbs it.

Eventually, the swan tires itself out. Maybe it recognizes the scent of Pete and maybe it just gives up, but eventually, the sound and the fury subside.

“If I get another noise complaint I am _so_ evicted,” says Joe. Then, perhaps realizing there are more pressing issues at hand, he tells Pete, “Patrick was here. He was so frantic. He seemed scared. He kept asking me to tell everyone goodbye. I gave him a guitar, got him calmed down writing some songs—they were good fucking songs too, better than anything else we’ve written. And then he—well, I don’t know how to say it, really. There was this blinding golden light and he just—turned into a swan.”

Words are so inadequate lately, Pete’s almost glad not to have them. ( _Almost_ glad. Don’t tell Jeanae.) Pete looks at Joe as seriously as he can, on his knees pressing a drowsy swan to his chest, and nods.

“Are you—yes? Are you agreeing that yes, Patrick turns into a swan now?”

Pete nods again.

Joe’s voice is rising. He’s definitely gonna get that noise complaint at this rate. “Because I spent _all day_ calling wildlife specialists and filling my search history with the _weirdest shit_ —even you would’ve been blushing at the porn that was coming up—and I couldn’t find anything. Nothing at all. I went to the _library_ , Pete. They sent me to the _fairy tales_ section. Then he woke up and shit got—ugly.”

Pete nods some more. It’s not like Patrick’s so pleasant and laidback as a human. Of course he’s an asshole when unwillingly transfigured into a swan.

“And you knew about this. This whole time—this _entire time_ —you knew about this. You could have just _told_ me?”

Pete shows his teeth in what he hopes Joe takes as a gesture of apology. Joe has started pacing. He’s brandishing the oven tongs in a way that Pete doesn’t love. “Could have just told me,” Joe is muttering. Whirling to face Pete and pointing an accusation with those tongs, he asks, “And this is why he’s been missing practice?”

Pete nods.

“So the studio time we have next week that we can barely afford. When we’re supposed to be recording demos we haven’t written yet. He wasn’t going to make it to that?”

Pete shakes his head, even though he can see Joe working himself up into a fearsome pique. “When were you going to _tell_ us?”

Pete covers his own mouth with his hand. He’s pushing it, he knows. He’s flirting with the edge of breaking the curse. He’s so _frustrated_. Even with the swan’s speeded heartbeat against his own, the stakes don’t feel real. Here is Patrick, sort of, hale and full of life. How could Pete’s actions really kill him?

“But he was Patrick a few hours ago,” Joe says. He’s back to pacing, trying to put the pieces together and seeming every bit the madman. “Does he just—randomly go waterfowl, or—?”

Pete taps the place on his wrist where other people wear watches and he wears tattoos and an armband. It’s the best explanation he can offer. In his arms, the swan’s breathing goes rumbly with the nearness of sleep.

“Okay, you know what?” Joe decides. His voice is higher than usual, sounding quiet strained. “This vow o’ silence thing has been just—so cute, so fun, wow, a great time. But this is a situation where _I need you to fucking talk to me_. You are going to talk to me, Pete. You are going to talk to me _right now_.”

Before Pete can react, Joe’s hand is on his jaw, trying to force his mouth open. The  swan, upset from Pete’s lap by the movement, ruffles its feathers and begins a long, slow-building shriek. Pete tries to keep calming contact with the swan with one hand and slap Joe away with the other.

At that exact moment, Andy bursts through the front door and everything goes even more to hell.

*

It’s Pete’s fault, really. He was crouching on the ground, the swan beginning to rampage anew, his grip slipping, and Joe leaning maniacally over him, stuffing his fingers into Pete’s mouth and shouting, as if in this way he could be midwife to Pete’s words. And Pete, freshly struck in the throat by the 79psi force of a fucking swan’s wing, Pete had the dumb audacity to think, _at least it can’t get any more cursed than this._

Cue Andy’s thundering entry.

He bursts in like an action hero, like he’s going to take charge of this situation, but then he sees what the actual situation _is_ and it gives him a moment’s pause in the doorway. The swan is using its one free wing to beat the shit out of everything within reach, which is mostly Pete, and Joe’s little Formica dining table.

“Why does everyone have swans in their apartments?” Andy asks quietly, as if there is a benign ghost up near the corner of the room who can help explain the facts of life to him. “Swans are not domesticated creatures. They are not house pets.”

“ _Make him talk, Andy! MAKE HIM TALK!_ ” Joe hollers, realizing that reinforcements have arrived. Pete is biting at Joe’s fingers, trying to get them away from his mouth, and doing a fair bit of damage to his own lips and tongue in the process. The swan catches him in the chin, jarring his jaw shut harder than Pete meant on Joe’s fingers. Joe howls. Pete’s mouth fills with the taste of someone else’s blood for once.

At least it gets Joe’s hands away from his mouth. Joe clutches his wound to his chest and Pete bares bloody teeth up at him menacingly, as if to say, _touch me again and I’ll bite them clean off_.

Andy, meanwhile, has sat down on the floor. This isn’t particularly safe, what with the swan slipping free from Pete’s grasp, screaming and snapping at the world, but from the look on Andy’s face, he simply doesn’t have it in him to remain upright a moment longer in the face of all this. “What is even _happening_ ,” Andy asks philosophically.

“Patrick is a swan and Pete is a cannibal,” accuses Joe. He’s not bleeding _that_ much. And he’s certainly not doing much to clarify the situation with his fancy powers of speech.

“Say that again in a way that makes sense?”

Getting wilier and more pissed by the second, the disturbed swan snakes its neck around, quick like a viper, and slams Pete in the nose with its unyielding beak. Pete can feel the nosebleed before it even starts. Three red drops fall on snow-white feathers before the swan squirms free. That’s it: Pete’s done all he can. The swan charges Joe, shrieking murderously. Joe dodges and the swan keeps going, running headfirst into the wall. It staggers back, a look in its black eyes Pete has never seen before. It straightens out and charges at the wall again. Its head slams drywall and it lets out a cry of pain. Pete doesn’t understand what it’s doing, and then he does. The swan slams into the wall a third time, its feathers getting bent, its head at a strange angle, it wings billowing nowhere. It’s hurting itself. It’s _trying_ to hurt itself.

Patrick’s in there, somewhere.

Trapped.

Patrick would die to get out.

Joe, in his wisdom, is now crouched atop his own dining table. “Maybe it will knock itself out,” he ventures, hopeful. Pete knows that the swan is trying for worse than that. One way or another, the swan is trying to escape.

“You know we go on in, like, thirty minutes?” Andy points out. “That’s why I’m here. God—look, it’s hurting itself—we have to stop it!”

Generally this is an aim Pete is in agreement with, but just now his brain is stalled out on what Andy said first. _We go on in thirty minutes_. But that means it’s late. That means it’s past sundown.

The swan winds up to charge at the wall again. It is weaving, now, from repeated impact. It is looking more battered than ever. Red seeps around his beak and Pete can’t tell if it’s his own blood or Patrick’s.

Patrick.

Blood makes him think of magic. Sundown, the swan not changing. Sundown, the swan trying to smash himself to pieces instead. Sundown, the coat not quite finished. Sundown, and out of options.

Pete grabs the stinging, burning coat from the chair it’s draped on. He throws himself between the swan and the wall at the last second; the swan collides with his legs, knocking Pete down. As he falls, he lets the coat drop from his blister-numb hands. Pete hits the ground as the nettle coat hits Patrick.

For a moment, the swan tries brokenly to pick himself up from the ground. His legs aren’t quite working. One wing hangs bent, possibly broken, from its battering. He blinks at Pete, something plaintive and ancient in his eyes, and Pete knows that if the coat doesn’t work, all he need do is speak one word to stop Patrick’s heart. One word for swift, painless mercy. One word for freedom from a feathered cage.

Pete would speak three. They have rattled ‘round his heart unsaid for too long. Chances sometimes set with the sun. He knows, now.

He wants Patrick to know too. Whatever of Patrick still exists.

The swan, hurt, lies under the coat. His breathing mixes up with whimper. Pete licks blood off his lip and prepares to confess his love.

Then, suddenly, Joe’s dining room erupts into supernova, sunrise light.

Andy screams. Pete is blind, but it sounds like Joe has fallen off the table. Pete stares into the center of the light like it’s a grenade blast, trying to make out the shape and name of the shadow at its center.

The light collapses down, folding in tighter and tighter, bit by bit making the shape of—yes—a man. A man. _Patrick_.

He is burning to look at, more blinding than any sun, and shining out his skin like heartsfire. Pete runs to him anyway. Pete sticks his hands into the light and touches rippling gold. Under his touch, Patrick’s forearms solidify. The light does not dim so much as melt, gleaming streaks of gold chasing over Patrick’s skin, not disappearing but becoming _harder_ , more solid, like tumbling topazes streamed and slipped through his skin. The sparks wend faster and faster, deeper and deeper, surfacing less often as they ripple in, in, in, restoring Patrick’s heart.

Restoring Pete’s.

Patrick’s eyes blaze gold, his breast aflame, and Pete declares himself helplessly. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Thrice for power, thrice for truth, thrice for binding. Thrice for ever.

Patrick’s lips are parted by golden breath. He grips Pete’s forearms back. Or—he tries to.

Because the coat wasn’t finished, quite.

From the elbow down, Patrick’s left arm is not an arm.

Patrick’s left arm is a swan’s wing.


	7. til the earth starts to crumble and the heavens roll away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What I Learned From Writing This Fic: Write Pete Wentz for long enough, and anyone becomes a bit of a furry.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!

There are some issues to address before anyone can go about living happily ever after. Namely: what did it mean when Patrick kissed Pete? Did it mean he was scared to die, or that he wanted to kiss Pete in particular? And: what will the best musician Pete knows do with only one hand? And: why does Pete’s heart quicken like that, imagining his skin being stroked by feathers?

The first order of business is group hugging and crying and, at long last, Pete’s explanation. His words are rusty, after so long without speech. He barely knows where to begin. He settles for saying, “There was a curse. I couldn’t speak until I broke it.”

Patrick, with one soft span of feather and one clever-fingered human hand, cradles Pete’s ruined hands. “Your poor hands,” he says. “Nettles were a terrible fucking idea.”

Pete, uncomfortable, slips his hands into his hoodie sleeves. He doesn’t want to hear about _his_ poor hands. The curse wasn’t meant to be kind, but this—this is unbearable. “I didn’t save you,” Pete says. His throat is hoarse. His nose still bleeds irregular drips into his lap. A knot of tears unshed burns at the back of his throat. “I wrecked you. You—you have a wing.”

“I have an idea,” Patrick says. Before anyone can stop him, he gets to his feet and strides purposefully out of Joe’s apartment. Andy helps Pete up, keeps an arm around him charitably. Joe leads them out into the night.

Patrick is standing on the shabby grass outside Joe’s building. He has his arms stretched in the moonlight. Before their eyes, his wing fizzes silver and resolves into an oddly gleaming human hand. Patrick’s grin is fixed to his face with determination, as if really he is devastated but he doesn’t want the others to know. As if he doesn’t want Pete to feel bad, even though all of this is Pete’s fault and Pete is terrible, really just the sorriest excuse of a boy ever to live.

“See? Man in the moonlight, swan in the sun. I’ll have both hands at night. That’s when our shows are anyway, right?”

“We’ll get you a prosthetic hand for the daytime,” Andy suggests.

Joe adds, “You’ll be able to do almost everything you normally would.”

“I’ve always been pretty much nocturnal anyway.”

Pete can hear in the tight cheeriness of everyone’s voices that they’re only trying to be nice. He squeezes his hands into fists, relishing the pain, the way the blisters split and crack. He will tear himself apart, if it makes this feel better. He will shred and shed his skin from the outside in. He will howl penitence from the inside out.

“This is all my fault,” Pete says. He’s so exhausted, the sleep deprivation of weeks crashing over him all at once. The fight is over. The curse is broken, more or less. So is Patrick. He’s ruined Patrick’s life. Just by his being in it, Patrick is ruined. “The curse was meant for me. I should be the one broken. She designed it so no one would be able to save me. It could only be undone if you had someone who loved you, someone who would sacrifice—it should be me. It’s meant to be me.”

He’s babbling, sinking to his knees in silver-dappled grass. Patrick squats down in front of him, leans forward to rest his forehead on the top of Pete’s head. Andy’s hand grips Pete’s shoulder. Joe’s legs press into Pete’s back. His friends surround him, stand like sentinels. He deserves to be abandoned but they’re not hearing him. He has words and by some new magic, they can’t hear him. This is his fault, his fault, his fault. They should cast him out. They should—

“We all love you,” Joe says gently. “Idiot.”

Pete looks up, blood and tears drying into well-worn tracks on his face. “But—” he says.

Patrick touches his cheek with a silver hand, one that will be a wing when once again the sun rises. He silences Pete with a careful, deliberate kiss.

Pete is quietly surprised at the relief he finds tucked away in silence.

*

There is a conversation, one of many, one of a series that is like to continue all through their lives, or as long as this thing lasts. It comes after the show, which they make it to, somehow. Pete can barely play but Patrick more than makes up for him. Patrick’s joy and relief burn up the stage. He glows gold in the stage lights, and not just the stage lights, Pete thinks. He makes everyone in the crowd believe in magic. His voice rips and soars, unself-conscious like never before, exactly like swan wings. He dances and thrashes over his guitar, electric with melody. He plays like a man grateful for each knuckle of each finger, for each unfeathered lungful of air. Watching Patrick play is the opposite of being cursed.

Then, after, Patrick pulls Pete into a shitty vinyl booth in the corner of the bar. He’s glowing still. Pete doesn’t understand why no one else seems to notice it. “I kissed you. You kissed me back,” he says.

Pete stares down into the beer he ordered and won’t drink. “More than kissed you,” he mumbles. He is so spent from the stage, from the panic attack he’s been living ever since Patrick first transformed, from the lack of sleep and the pain of nettles and the way his best wasn’t near enough and how Patrick’s going to say it was all a mistake, a symptom of desperation, just a way to use a body that made him feel human again.

Patrick blushes, grinning rueful at the tabletop. He swipes Pete’s beer and takes a sip. He winces at the taste, then goes back to smiling. “Yes. The graveyard,” Patrick says. “That was almost worth the curse.”

When Pete doesn’t react, Patrick sighs. “Will you look at me, at least?”

Pete really, really doesn’t want to.

“I’m sorry for what I said. Um—I probably made you feel pretty disposable. Like you didn’t mean anything much to me.”

Pete, who knows he deserves to feel much worse than that, just shrugs. “Wasn’t anything,” Pete says. He drinks some of his beer after all, tries not to taste Patrick’s lips on the rim. “You wouldn’t have been so desperate if I hadn’t gotten you cursed. Can’t imagine what things I’d say, situation like that.”

“Okay, stop.” Patrick’s voice is tight with crabbiness. Pete relaxes a little, knowing the warning signs of a Mount Patruvius eruption. He will feel so much better when Patrick’s yelling at him. When Patrick’s finally treating him like he deserves. Pete’s not good at much, but he knows how to absorb blows. “It’s not your fault I got cursed. You understand that, right? You didn’t literally curse me? It’s Jeanae’s fault. She is the only person to blame in this situation.”

Pete takes another sip of his beer. “She wouldn’t have needed to try and curse me if I wasn’t—”

“And if I wasn’t so pathetically into you, I wouldn’t have let you sleep in my bed in the first place, and the curse wouldn’t have hit me instead of you. And if I hadn’t gone to Borders that day, I would never have met Joe, and I never would have met you at all, and I wouldn’t have ended up cursed either. And if your parents hadn’t boned nine months before you were born, your particular genetic makeup never would have combined in this particular way, and if Jeanae had gotten rear-ended on her way to my apartment, and if she wasn’t a creepy mean witch in the first place, and if dinosaurs had never died out, and if fish had never crawled out of the sea—”

“Okay, okay,” Pete interrupts. He’s laughing just the tiniest amount, though he’d never admit it.

“And if you hadn’t woven a coat of nettles, I would still be a swan,” finishes Patrick. His voice is softer than Pete can stand.

“Didn’t do it right, though, did I?” Pete demands, voice blunt as the instrument he wants to be struck with.

Patrick takes Pete’s hands roughly. Pete makes a small sound of pain. “Look at your fucking hands,” Patrick growls. “ _Look at them_.”

So Pete looks. Thick chunks of white, pus-warped, dead skin are punctuated by furious red welts. Cracks ringed in putrefying yellow darken from marrow-gold to valentine-red to heartsblood-black. The stink of infection rises from them. The palms are torn by long-unhealed weals and blistering open sores. The fingers are double-thick with swollen pain; they barely curl. They are numb, clumsy, discolored and burnt almost beyond recognition of human hands.

Patrick knocks back more of Pete’s beer than he is strictly entitled to. “I think you were weaving as fast as you could,” Patrick says. “Faster, maybe.”

Pete closes his eyes because he doesn’t want to look anymore.

“You saved me,” Patrick says, as if that settles it. Maybe it does. “And I made you feel like you didn’t mean anything to me, and being terrified doesn’t make that okay. This is me apologizing.”

Pete nods. He peeks at Patrick through a slit in his eyelids. “Were you really? Pathetically into me?”

Patrick shows his teeth grinning. “Yes. Obviously. Yes. Being scared isn’t what made me want to kiss you. Being scared just made me brave enough to do it.”

“I told you I loved you,” Pete blurts out. Three times promised, three times vowed.

“Couldn’t have broken the curse if you didn’t, right?” Patrick says. He finishes Pete’s beer without asking. Pete supposes malt liquor will have to do, since he doesn’t have fear of death to make him brave anymore. “If you’d stop beating yourself up for a second, maybe I’d get the chance to tell you: I love you too.”

And maybe there’s more magic in the world than he ever realized, because Patrick Stump says _I love you_ , and Pete Wentz believes him.

*

At night, Patrick touches him with hands and lips and heart. Pete falls asleep with his head on Patrick’s naked chest, his whole body quivering with the ghost of Patrick’s love. He wakes with lovebites and bruises. He wakes with feathers in his face, or at his waist, or on his…

Never has Pete loved waking so much.

They sleep the day away, or go downtown to the big public library and dig through dusty books, or scroll through the blogs of worldwide witches, looking for countercurses, for potions and unguents to smooth away the aftereffects of bad spellcasting. They browse through arcane supply stores, Pete stroking secret feathers inside Patrick’s sleeve, Patrick kissing Pete’s neck and blushing when people look at them. The Wiccans they meet are almost too helpful; they run into Jeanae only once, wearing white now like she’s had her fill of harm magic, and she buys them half the shop, more purifying crystals and bundles of herbs than they’ll use in a lifetime. When the sun goes down, they work on their album, or play shows, or eat pizza and play board games with Joe and Andy. Sometimes Pete’s shower drain clogs with feathers, and for a long time, nothing worse happens to them than that.

*

Here is what happens after the fairy tale ends, after the curse is mostly-broken and the prince is mostly-human:

Pete is learning.

Pete is learning to be careful with his words, now that he knows the weight of them, built up on his tongue. Pete is learning to say what he means when he gets the chance, because chances are fickle, easily lost. Pete is learning how to restore himself with quiet, instead of erasing himself with noise.

Pete is learning about intention.

Pete is trying to be the kind of person who doesn’t get his friends cursed, who doesn’t need to fear what he’d turn into if he his outside matched his insides. He is trying to live like he has people who love him, people who would sacrifice for him, people who would weave him a nettle coat. He is learning to believe that he does.

He is trying to be worthy of the love of a swan.

And he is learning to accept it, worthy or not.

What would you call all this, if not _happily ever after_?


End file.
